Bluebeat’s Beatles ‘simulations’ infringe copyright

January 2011

COPYRIGHTRecord labels, internet

A US federal judge has found that BlueBeat.com, the website that began selling Beatles songs online for 25 cents each in 2009, guilty of copyright infringement. BlueBeat, which is also home to a streaming service, had argued that it actually owned new copyrights as they had created “psycho-acoustic simulation” versions of the Beatles recordings but U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton Tucker rejected this claim in her ruling last week saying “[The] obscure and undefined pseudo-scientific language appears to be a long-winded way of describing ‘sampling,’ i.e. copying, and fails to provide any concrete evidence of independent creation”. It is expected that the owners of the Beatles’ copyrights, including EMI and others will now seek monetary damages on those illegal distributions – Bluebeat said that 67,000 tracks had been downloaded before the court ordered a stop. The Beatles’ catalogue is now (finally) available for legal digital purchase on Apple’s.